In recent years there has been a rapid increase in the production and adoption of mobile data communications devices and services in the worldwide marketplace. Wireless networks and operational capabilities potentially allow users to carry the devices almost anywhere and to use them to obtain and store electronic data. With the ability to employ data protocols such as HTTP (for Internet), POP/IMAP (for mail) and GSM (for voice), these devices have significant communications versatility. These devices typically have user input components, for instance, phone keypads and joysticks. Some have full keyboards, which enhance their communications capability.
Various devices employ specific wireless capabilities and subscribe to wireless services to improve their functionality and efficiency, including using certain data transports to link the device to a land-based server. Of the various wireless services, some allow data to be sent, or pushed, to a mobile device from a land-based server with or without any initiating request from the mobile device. Because these devices are typically accessible using standard Internet protocols, they are capable of communicating and interacting with most of the standard technologies and services in use with personal computers such as the various Microsoft Windows operating systems or Apple Mac OS X operating systems, and their various associated functions and applications.
Within this environment, technologies such as the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and XML (extensible Markup Language) have helped to standardize the way devices and people communicate. For instance, XML is quickly becoming the foundation for allowing computer-based services to communicate with each other. One form of XML called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows news articles to be published in a standard format. Presently, RSS-based news articles are widely available on the Internet, used by everything from personal web logs to commercial news agencies. In addition to RSS, other competing news syndication formats also exist, including Atom.
RSS communicates news articles in a digitized data format through data feeds in machine readable formats to be read and processed by receiving devices, which may be computers or other programmable nodes, which then format the news articles to be read by users. Applications such as RSS Readers or RSS Aggregators have been developed for most popular computing platforms (such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X) operating the receiving devices. These applications allow users to subscribe to RSS data feeds, poll the feeds to see when new articles are available, and present the feeds in a user readable format. Typically, dedicated applications for reading news data feeds poll feeds at regular intervals (once an hour, for example) to retrieve available news articles and their updates. Web-based RSS aggregators read RSS data feeds and present the articles in a readable HTML format within a web browser. In addition, RSS is increasingly becoming the preferred transport for newer web technologies like podcasting and video podcasting, essentially syndicating references to larger audio and video streams in addition to simple text.
With respect to receiving news data feeds, and presenting these in a user readable format, mobile data communication devices have limitations that differentiate them from personal computers, for example. These include limitations on the amount of memory, the speed of the central processing unit, the physical size of the display, the physical size of the input devices, the speed and cost of network communication, and the power source and battery life, among others. As such, the rise in popularity of RSS, podcasting and video podcasting technology has exposed a number of shortfalls in its application to and communications with mobile devices.
Users subscribe to RSS-based content, and the content can be delivered to the mobile device without the user explicitly asking for it at that specific moment (much like a mailman can place a newspaper or magazine in your mailbox for retrieval). As mentioned above, mobile devices are often much more constrained than desktop computers. Specifically they usually have a much lower storage capacity capable of storing information. Additionally, stressing those resources (for example, by storing a lot of content on a device) can often impact the performance and usability of the device to the point where it is no longer useful.
Therefore, for services that exists where users can subscribe to content and have it automatically delivered to the device, there is a need or potential for benefit for ways of automatically managing the content to improve or maximize the possibility that: a) the user is gaining access to the content they want to see, and b) the delivery of content is not stressing the resources of the mobile device. As examples, needs and potential for benefit exist for methods for delivering content to mobile devices, and for mobile devices for receiving content through a wireless communications network, wherein the mobile device contains content management software containing instructions that facilitate efficient content management and delivery to the user. Potential for improvement exists in these and other areas that may be apparent to a person of skill in the art having studied this document.